


and the world spins eastward

by ghostscribe



Series: 9,000 meters above sea level [12]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: Gen, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, ive been meaning to write this one ghjfdk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:09:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23172205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostscribe/pseuds/ghostscribe
Summary: Hours pass in the silence of her own house. She opens a book to read but doesn't really read it. Sometimes life carries on normally but sometimes she remembers her son is living on a god-forsaken mountain and she can't bring herself to think of anything else.
Relationships: Red's mom ships them that's all, reguri but thats not the focus
Series: 9,000 meters above sea level [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1067045
Comments: 4
Kudos: 72





	and the world spins eastward

The world seems to spin westward on this rainy Monday afternoon.

Miss Clover Sterling has never struggled with Mondays the way the rest of the town seems to struggle; it's just another day in the week, after all. The beginning of a work week, perhaps, but for her, every week is the same. For her, every Monday is a gardening day, and it's about time to start pulling up some home-grown produce, so she's in fact quite content with the Monday at hand.

She wouldn't say _thrilled_ though, no. It's hard to be that happy about anything anymore.

"Good morning!" It's Daisy's voice, calling from next door, over the shallow fence. She sees the fence as more of a formality but it's one she almost loathes, oh, she yearns to tear it down and break the visible boundaries, because even her heart screams out that the fence is too tall and she is too far away from the rest of her sleepy little town.

"Good morning, Daisy," and her voice is quiet, calm, not unlike - "Oh, is that a raindrop?"

"I hope not..." Daisy crosses her arms. "I was supposed to take some Pokémon out to play in the yard behind grandpa's lab before settling them down to groom them. If I can't let them play, they'll all get too fidgety. It gets hard to groom them, then."

She feels like this conversation has happened before, but she doesn't mention it. She pulls her gardening hat a bit more over her face, not unlike - "Oh, let them play anyway. You'd have to wash them before you groom them anyway, right?"

"Yeah, but not in the rain. There's no shampoo or conditioner in the rain."

Miss Sterling laughs softly, not unlike - "Well, let's take it one step at a time. I'm sure a little rain won't ruin your parade. Besides, some Pokémon _love_ running around in a nice drizzle. Maybe that'll make them even more wild outside so you can settle them in easier once they're indoors."

"Hm... I guess so. I didn't think about it that way."

"Mhm." Just a hum, not unlike - "Always look on the bright side, honey."

"You always say that!" Daisy grins, beams at the positivity. Raindrop beat down on the brim of the woman's hat.

"That's what I do best." What she tries to do best, anyway.

"Well, it's always a pleasure. Don't catch a cold out here, Miss Sterling!"

"I'll be just fine, don't worry."

The conversation seems to end, and she lets it end. She goes quiet, not unlike her son.

Not unlike Red.

Rain beats down on her as she pulls up carrots and plucks tomatoes from her garden; she pays the weather no mind. It was never something to bother her very much, although now she has a deep, primal fear each time she hears of a blizzard brewing up on Mt Silver. It's a fear not for herself, of course, but for Red, her stubborn little boy who just won't come back home. It's been years. It's been _years,_ and yet she knows - and he knows - he hasn't been forgotten enough to feel safe in coming home, she's been told. He's still too close to the public eye, still terrified, and she knows this and loves him anyway but god she misses him so much it _hurts._

In his letters, Red feigns wellness. Green tells her how he really feels, and a hole has burnt into her chest. What a terrible mother for not taking better care of her little one.

Every week is the same. She tends to her garden, her Nidorina, both of which act as outlets for the care she can't offer her own son anymore. She sends up care packages for Red with Green's help, and honest to god she yearns to visit that boy for herself, but she's nowhere near young enough nor skilled enough to make it even halfway up the mountain. She'd already been out of practice by the time Red was born, and since he left - since she had one less child out of one to dote on - her life became still and quiet.

Painfully quiet.

Tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and leeks lie in her harvest today. She carries them in, as the rain begins to really pour, and she tilts her hat down, not unlike Red. She wonders if she picked up on that habit from her, and she wonders, as she hangs her hat up to dry inside, if she was too quiet, and if she taught him to be quiet too, and if her own introversion is what led him into a spiral of social anxiety and panic, and she wonders if that's why he ran away. She wonders if she taught him how to fear and she wonders if she hurt him.

Tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and leeks. One by one she washes them and sets them aside in trendy little wicker dishes. She wonders if Red still uses the bowl she sent up to him on one of Green's trips.

Green hasn't come over today, which is unusual for him. Usually he likes to visit on Mondays; it's his first day back at the gym for the week, and he takes the lunch break to see if she's doing well, and perhaps he takes the moment to feel a little less lonely himself. She recalls him wanting to stay with her and Red almost daily in the months following the loss of his parents, and she wishes she had just adopted the poor thing after, some time last year, he had confided in her about his grandfather's treatment of him. He's a rotten man.

She wonders, then, if she's an even more rotten mother for having lost her own son.

Carrots, leeks, those go in today's soup. The tomatoes and cucumbers, she reserves for a lunch as she waits for said soup. She eats sandwiches at lunch and soup often at dinner. Her soup was one of Red's favorite foods, and yet he would never eat anything by the same recipe even if it were at a restaurant, because it wasn't the _right_ soup. Such a picky eater. She places tomatoes and cucumbers on her sandwich and notes that he would've picked them off, eaten the cucumbers on their own, and pushed the tomatoes to the side of the plate.

The house smells like home. It doesn't _sound_ like home without his little footsteps running to and fro. Sometimes Green could fill the absence just a little but sometimes he would come over and lay in Red's room and leave two days later without saying much of anything. She never took offense to it. She knew how hard it is on him, too. It happens less often now that he's older, and now that he's older his feelings for Red have only deepened.

_Kinda hard to have a friend so far away when you're in love with him,_ and Green suddenly looked startled at his own words, as if he had offended her.

_I think you two would be a perfect pair,_ because she didn't know what else to say, but she meant it, and still means it. Red was always just _glowing_ after Green would go home, as if the boy were a drug to him, and when she asked one day how he felt about Green, his answer was vague in the way that answers can be when a child has yet to understand the meaning of a love so deep;

_He makes me wanna stay with him forever and ever._

_When's the wedding?,_ she thought, didn't ask, she knew Red didn't even fully understand his feelings at the time. She had always assumed perhaps it was a puppy love he would grow out of, and she wondered then - and wonders now - if perhaps he would've been straight if Green had been a girl, if maybe Green is just so overwhelmingly lovable that Red would want to be with him _forever and ever_ no matter what the circumstances may be.

Red ran away when he was twelve years old. _Forever and ever._

She has fears. She awakes in the night and fears he's frozen to death. She desperately wants to call Green, perhaps Kris, or maybe even Ethan, or maybe even Fire, she wants to call one of those kids and ask them to check on her little one, but she doesn't want to frighten them, doesn't want to be a burden, not unlike her son.

He didn't want to be a burden. He promised he would be okay, he didn't need help, he was just shy, but when he started crying whenever he'd hear an unfamiliar voice, when he blotted out his windows with masking tape and newspapers, when he never outgrew that selective mutism, she realized she was a rotten mother for having taken his word for it.

She tried to help, then, with love and support and a dash of therapy, and two months later he ran away.

Hours pass in the silence of her own house. She opens a book to read but doesn't really read it. Sometimes life carries on normally but sometimes she remembers her son is living on a god-forsaken mountain and she can't bring herself to think of anything else.

Dinner rolls around. Her soup is finished and she eats her share, contains the rest for later. She puts some in a separate container to send up with Kris so Red can have a nice home cooked meal - because Green hasn't visited Red in ages, she recalls, and sometimes with how fondly he talks about Red she forgets they had something of a falling out. She wonders, then, if the two will ever find anyone else to fill the voids left in their lives. She presumes not.

She tries again to read but fails to do so. The rain continues. It's eight in the evening when she decides to go to bed. The rain stops and the night feels inconclusive.

It's nearly midnight when she hears a knock at the front door.

It's such a light tap that she barely hears it, but she assumes it must be either Green or maybe Kris - more likely Kris, as she tends to actually knock. Green visits so often he just lets himself in with the spare key. She's woken up to him making breakfast for the two of them at six in the morning because _I couldn't get back to sleep and it would've been rude not to make you something too._

She puts on her robe over her pajamas; even this late into the spring, it's still chilly in the evenings. She walks downstairs, hesitates, almost wonders if she should bother, but realizes it would really only be someone she knows at the door, even at this hour.

She opens the door.

And she sobs.

She only has to look for a second before she drags him into a hug, and he hugs back just as tight. She babbles through her tears, all incoherent, but he nods along as if he understands, and maybe he does, and maybe the way he grips the back of her robe like he would when he was young and tired is more of an answer than if he said something, anything right now.

Cool air rushes in through the door, but neither of the two pay it any mind.

Red is home. Red is _home._

"Oh, my sweet boy," and that's all she manages to say after ten minutes of holding him, of leaving the door open, ten minutes of even forgetting where she is or what time it is or how the house didn't feel like a home until just now. She runs her hand through his hair and it feels slick with grease, she knows he wrote to her once and told her he washes it in the mountain streams sometimes, but it must have been awhile since he last did, and while he's older now and taller now (not to say he's taller than her, funnily enough), she has the urge to wash it herself and wrap him up in a towel and give him some dessert before bed, she wants to remind him to bundle up when it's cold at night and bring him an extra blanket that he'll kick off during the night anyway, she wants, she wants -

She _has_ her son. He's home.

"...I'm sorry, mom." So quiet and yet so loud. He's crying too and she wants nothing more than to comfort him.

"That's okay," answered without even a _second_ of hesitation, not even a _second._ "It's okay, Red, everything is okay. I'm just happy you're home - " and her voice breaks near the end, becomes almost unintelligible again. "I'm just happy you're home."

Red nods softly, an almost undetectable gesture, like a ghost.

Then, so softly, as if he wants only her to hear him speak, "I missed you."

"I missed you too, sweetheart." She plants a kiss on his head, sways with him, and if were younger he might pull away and insist he's too old for that, but now he stays glued to her. "I'm so, so happy you're here. I'm so happy you're _alive,"_ and something about that must have struck him in some tender corner of his heart, because now he's sobbing into the crook of her neck. "Shhh, it's alright, it's alright. Everything is alright, Red. You're safe here."

It takes a few cracked syllables for him to get his words out, and though they're short, they carry a power to them now that it's been so long since she's heard his voice, and they carry a power now that he repeats the sentiment when words were once so unnecessary in his mind. "I'm really sorry."

"It's okay, little one," even though he's grown since she last saw him, he's her son, still her little one. "Thank you for coming home."

When she finally pulls away from the hug, maybe another twenty minutes later, that's when she realizes what a mess he is, she notices just how matted his hair is and how there's little scrapes and dirt littering his skin. That's when she tells him to go take a nice warm shower while she heats up some soup for him, and that's when it feels like he's really home again. It feels like he's home when he comes out with the towel over his shoulders to keep his hair from dripping on his shirt, when he eats almost three bowls of soup, when he stays with her at the kitchen table to talk until the sun comes up and the crickets fall quiet.

She almost fears falling asleep. She fears she'll wake up and Red will be gone.

She awakens the next morning, only three, maybe four hours after she first fell asleep. She cracks his door open to see him curled up on his bed with Pikachu tightly snuggled next to him.

She cracks his door open to see her son, and the world spins eastward again.

**Author's Note:**

> so anyone who knows my tumblr url of red-sterling? yeah thats bc my hc surname for Red is _Sterling_ and i dont remember where i pulled that from
> 
> also like. look i live for nameless and Green missing his friend but? Red's mom?? quietly devastated. empty nest-ing is probably a lot more strenuous when you thought your son was dead for two years and then you find out he still doesn't wanna come home because he has severe anxiety that you never got around to fixing before his disappearance
> 
> also Red loves his mom and wrote letters to her all the time okay you cannot and will not take this functional family from me ~~bc my own family is a fucking disaster okay let me have this~~
> 
> minimal proofreading this time? but i also didnt sleep much last night so uh. apologies for anything i goofed up in here


End file.
